A Research On Effect Of Macroeconomic Uncertainty On Corporate Investment

The world is in the midst of changes not seen in a century,and the resulting uncertainties have a huge impact on the economy.This was true of the Great Depression of 1929,the oil crisis of 1973,the financial crisis of 1987,the Asian financial crisis of1997,the global financial crisis of 2008,the European debt crisis of 2011,and the COVID-19 in 2019.These economic crises have had an irreversible impact on economic activity,leading to a global economic recession and a major impact on people's lives.For various uncertainties,there are endogenous economic reasons as well as exogenous ones.It is of great theoretical and practical significance to sort out and analyze the uncertainty in economic activities and explore the impact of economic uncertainty on the real economy for preventing systemic financial risks and maintaining the stability of the financial system.The theme of this paper is to discuss the impact of China's macroeconomic uncertainty on the investment behavior of listed companies.It carries out in-depth research in the following aspects with theoretical and empirical analysis.1.The construction of indicators of macroeconomic uncertainty in China.This paper combed and contrastively analyzed the theoretical basis of Frank Knight's uncertainty,Keynesian uncertainty and post-Keynesian uncertainty,and held that macroeconomic uncertainty is the macroeconomic uncertainty left after removing the predictable components of economic indicators.By reviewing the literature on economic uncertainty in recent years,this paper argues that there are some limitations in using single economic index and market volatility as the measurement of macroeconomic uncertainty.Based on the previous theoretical basis,this paper uses the research of Jurado et al.(2015)for reference,adopts the FARVAR(Factor-augmented Vector Autoregressions)model,and adopts China's macro data and industry indicators in the past two decades to jointly construct China's macro economic uncertainty indicators.The macro-economic uncertainty index calculated in this paper is negatively correlated with the fluctuation of China's economic growth rate,and it well explains the economic fluctuations caused by the Asian financial crisis in 1998,the global financial crisis around 2008 and the European debt crisis around 2011,as well as the relatively low performance of China's economy in 2015.Finally,the differences between the macroeconomic uncertainty index calculated in this paper and the economic policy uncertainty index are compared and analyzed.The results show that there is no substitution relationship between the macroeconomic uncertainty index and the economic policy uncertainty index measured in this paper.And the concept of the company investment is defined.The company investment in this paper consists of fixed assets investment,financial investment and innovation investment.2.Empirical analysis of macroeconomic uncertainty on China's listed companies on the impact of fixed assets investment and the mechanism.This paper studies the influence of macroeconomic uncertainty on listed companies' fixed asset investment and its influence mechanism.Referencing the existing literature,this paper takes the fixed asset investment of listed companies as the explained variable and controls the trend influence of industry and time,and constructs the fixed effect panel model.In the aspect of heterogeneity analysis,we investigate the difference of influence degree of companies with different equity nature,marketization degree and industry monopoly degree.This paper discusses the transmission mechanism of real option theory and financial friction theory on the influence of macroeconomic uncertainty on corporate investment.The results show that with the increase of macroeconomic uncertainty,the firm's fixed asset investment will decrease significantly,especially for non-state-owned companies and companies in regions with high degree of marketization.Further research shows that the financing constraints caused by financial friction may play a mediating role.Correlative robustness tests also confirm the reliability of the conclusions in this paper.3.Empirical analysis of the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on financial investment of China's listed companies.Empirical analysis is made on the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and financial investment of listed companies.In terms of variable selection,the macroeconomic uncertainty constructed in Chapter 1 is taken as the explanatory variable,and the financial investment of listed companies as the explained variable.Through empirical research,it is found that when macroeconomic uncertainty increases,financial investment of listed companies will decrease significantly.At the same time,macroeconomic uncertainty will have different effects on companies with different equity nature,marketization index and monopoly degree.The results show that the financial investment of non-state-owned,high-market index and low-monopoly listed companies is more sensitive to macroeconomic uncertainty.Then this chapter discusses the influence mechanism of macroeconomic uncertainty on listed companies' fixed assets investment by financial friction theory.Further research finds that financing constraints,as an intermediary variable,affect the transmission of macroeconomic uncertainty to corporate financial investment,which proves the existence of a transmission mechanism of financial friction.The robustness test results also support the main conclusions of this paper.The conclusions of this paper provide empirical evidence for understanding the impact of economic uncertainty on investment at the firm level,and also provide a perspective for understanding investment strategies of firms.4.Empirical analysis is made on the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and innovation investment of listed companies.Based on the fixed effects panel data model,this paper examines the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on the innovation of listed companies,taking R&D investment,patent application and R&D efficiency as the explained variables respectively.The effects of ownership nature,marketization index,monopoly degree and government subsidy on the research results are also discussed.Finally,financing constraints are used as an intermediary variable in mechanism analysis to test the influence mechanism of macroeconomic uncertainty on the innovation of listed companies.The results show that macroeconomic uncertainty has a negative impact on R&D investment,patent application volume and R&D efficiency of listed companies,which is different from the result of the impact of economic policy uncertainty on firm innovation.In addition,macroeconomic uncertainty has different effects on companies with different equity nature,marketization index,monopoly degree and government subsidies.The results show that the innovation index of non-state-owned,low marketization index,low monopoly degree and low government subsidy listed companies is more sensitive to macroeconomic uncertainty.Finally,this paper confirms the mediating effect of financing constraints as a mediating variable.This paper proposes the following policy recommendations.First,macroeconomic uncertainties should be fully revealed and paid high attention to.Macroeconomic uncertainty exists objectively in economic activities,and spreads through the main body and organization of economic operation,thus affecting all aspects of the real economy.It is necessary to strengthen the research on macroeconomic uncertainty,develop relevant macroeconomic information products and conduct orderly disclosure,so that listed companies,financial institutions and individual investors can avoid and hedge risks.At the same time,we should establish the monitoring,analysis,early warning and other mechanisms of macroeconomic uncertainty,and do a good job in the management of relevant expectations,so as to reduce the impact of economic uncertainty on the real economy.It is necessary to strengthen the construction of macroeconomic database and enrich multi-frequency and multi-category data,so as to provide a data basis for the measurement of macroeconomic uncertainty based on big data.Secondly,it is necessary to attach great importance to the phenomenon of sluggish enterprise investment when macroeconomic uncertainty increases.The empirical results of this paper show that macroeconomic uncertainty has an objective impact on the company's fixed asset investment,especially on the investment of non-state-owned enterprises.Therefore,attention should be paid to the fluctuation of enterprise investment due to economic uncertainty and its possible impact on the overall economy.In particular,attention should be paid to the impact of economic uncertainty on investment of nonstate-owned enterprises.Finally,we need to further enrich the policy toolbox conducive to business investment.We will further improve the investment and financing environment and vigorously promote reform of the financial supply side.This paper finds that financing constraints can play a mediating role in the process of the impact of uncertainty on firm investment.Therefore,it is necessary to further promote the reform of financial supply side,improve corporate financial constraints,and alleviate the impact of economic uncertainty on firm investment.At the policy level,it is still an important aspect of the banking reform to solve the problem of credit rationing,such as the high cost and difficulty of financing for enterprises,and vigorously develop differentiated financial services.At the same time,we should further accelerate the reform and construction of the multi-level capital market,further increase the proportion of direct financing of enterprises,and provide long-term and stable sources of funds for the investment and development of enterprises.Monitoring,strengthen economic uncertainty when economic uncertainty degree enhancement,can be appropriately adjust the investment policy,integrated application of a variety of tools,such as reduce investment threshold,further improve the business environment,the enhancement enterprise faith,encourage innovation input channels,such as efforts to reduce the enterprise cost,improve enterprise expected future cash flow,so as to guarantee the enterprise investment basically stable.The potential contributions of this paper are as follows.First of all,this paper uses Jurado et al.'s model(2015)for reference to construct macroeconomic uncertainty indicators based on high-dimensional monthly macro data of China.This index incorporated as much macroeconomic data as possible to construct the macroeconomic uncertainty index,which accurately described the economic uncertainty in China.Secondly,through the comparison with economic policy economic uncertainty,the difference and practical significance between the two indexes are proposed.Different from the uncertainty of economic policy,the index more reflects the uncertainty in the operation of the real economy.It overcomes the time delay and non-objectivity of language in the uncertainty of economic policy.Then,the influence of economic uncertainty on the investment behavior of listed companies is accurately depicted.The empirical results of this paper show that the investment and innovation of listed companies are negatively correlated with economic uncertainty,especially for nonstate-owned companies,companies with low market index,companies with low monopoly degree and companies with low government subsidies.At the corporate level,it can adjust its business strategy and investment through the indicators of macroeconomic uncertainty and its own economic uncertainty.To a certain extent,this provides an early warning mechanism for the company's financial risks.At the level of supervision,it provides a new perspective for the government to supervise.Finally,based on the transmission mechanism of the impact of economic uncertainty on the real economy,this paper explores the influence mechanism of economic uncertainty on corporate investment behavior from the perspectives of real option theory and financial friction theory,and verifies the existence of the mediating effect of financing constraints as an intermediary variable.